Neanderthals and early modern humans made the same stone tools
Mousterian flint tools dominated western Eurasia for some 120,000 years. In Europe Neanderthals made them; in North Africa and the Near East, early anatomically modern humans did. In the Eastern Mediterranean the two species' toolkits look so alike that archaeologists cannot tell whose hands shaped a given assemblage.
Archaeologists call the Mousterian, also labelled Mode III, a stone-tool industry, and it marks the later Middle Paleolithic. Its core span runs from about 160,000 to 40,000 years before present. Counting its forerunner, the Levallois or Levallois-Mousterian, pushes the start back to around 300,000 to 200,000 BP. The Aurignacian of Homo sapiens, roughly 43,000 to 28,000 BP, came after it.
The name comes from Le Moustier, a stack of three rock shelters in the Dordogne in France. The typical kit held hand axes, points and racloirs, a kind of scraper. Knappers sometimes worked their flint and chert by preparing a core first, the Levallois method being one such approach. The style turns up right across Europe outside the ice sheets, and in West Asia and North Africa too. Experts sort it into variants such as the Denticulate, the Charentian, named for the Charente region, and the Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition, with its Type-A and Type-B forms.
Who made the tools depended on the region. European examples were Neanderthal work, and some from Pech de l'Aze include remarkably tiny Levallois points, which has led a few researchers to link them to the Neanderthals' stronger grip. North African Mousterian may be as old as 315,000 years, and there it was the work of modern humans. Around 45,000 to 40,000 BP the industry overlapped with a newer one, the Chatelperronian.
Croatia is rich in sites. Krapina and Vindija lie in the north-west, while an underwater dig at Kastel Stafilic - Resnik yielded around 100 artefacts, half of them tools. Another single tool was found off Povljana on the island of Pag.
Source: Mousterian
